Playing with fire

Our fearless reporter survives glass blowing's blazing furnaces and has the heart to prove it

January 27, 2008|By Shaila Wunderlich, TRIBUNE REPORTER

Like an extreme sport of the arts, glass blowing may be one of the only arts that encourages its novice participants to play with fire and sharp tools. First-timer? Seven years old? No worries! Step right up to that blazing furnace, pick up that scalding hot rod of iron, shove it in those 2,500-degree flames and get yourself a gob of glass.

That fearless, you-can-do-it attitude isn't what brought us to Peter Patterson Glassworks in Mundelein. But it is definitely what made us come back. What originally brought us to the small, garage-like workshop located in the back of an industrial-park strip was Patterson's annual Open House. Every year around Thanksgiving, Christmas and Valentine's Day, he discounts his older glass pieces by as much as 80 percent and invites people to come shop. While there, shoppers are invited to try their hands at making a glass pumpkin, ornament or heart.

Making the trip even more worthwhile was Chicago's intimate and storied connection with the art of glass. Washington-state glass god Dale Chihuly held one of the most heralded exhibits of his career here in 2001, and as we later learned, Illinois claims its own healthy handful of glass artisans.

Just down the road from Patterson, for example, sits the studio of James Wilbat, an artist known for his colorful and curvy perfume bottles. Thirty miles south in Lombard resides another 30-plus-year veteran of the art, Robert Fritz. All three of these artists began their careers in the mid-1970s and early '80s, about a decade after the contemporary form of the art came exploding onto the scene via University of Wisconsin-Madison's glass program, spearheaded by the respected Harvey Littleton.

"When we first started, it seems there were probably about four of us in the Chicagoland area," Fritz says. "A couple other artists worked out of my studio until they eventually branched off and got their own spaces."

But again, it was the do-it-yourself part that really grabbed our attention -- and had us coming back a second and third time. One look at the grace and freedom with which Patterson handled his art had us wanting to dive right in. He flipped and rolled and puffed air through the long rod, slowly expanding the bubble of gooey glass on the other side. For him to then turn to us and with complete confidence say, "Want to try?" -- well, we were hooked.

That seductive demonstration would turn out to be the first part of our tutorial. Through watching him, we got a feeling for the quick, fluid movement the glass demanded, as well as the curious inside lingo. Words like "frit," "rod," "cane," "lip," "punty," "blow pipe" and "collar" tumbled out of Patterson's mouth. After 20 minutes of watching Patterson and his assistant, Sue Esson, walk and talk us through a couple of demonstrations, it was our turn.

Patterson motioned toward a fish bowl full of groovy plastic sunglasses and told me to select a pair for eye protection. A black-rimmed, yellow-lensed Jackie-O style were my frames of choice. This would be the extent of the day's safety training.

Approaching the side-by-side furnaces, Patterson handed me a tool known as a rod -- a long, skinny metal pole used to collect and maneuver the molten glass. He stepped on a floor pedal, hurling open the furnace doors to reveal a pool of lava-like glass. Injecting the end of the rod into the furnace, I swirled it through the fiery pool, collecting a blob of glass called a "gather."

It was at this step -- the first step -- that I realized this endeavor was going to be so much more difficult than Patterson made it look. Weighing in at about 6 pounds, the rod was considerably heavier than it appeared. The reason it appeared so much lighter is because in Patterson's hands, the rod was in constant motion, ever turning, waving and dipping to keep the hot, drippy glass from oozing off the end. "The key to glass blowing," Patterson said, "is keeping the glass centered on the rod and understanding the temperature of the glass."

What he failed to mention is that these two "keys" can be years in mastering. In my hands, the rod resembled a stick-shift on a hill, rolling forward, abruptly halting, rolling backward, abruptly halting. Only Patterson's periodic interventions prevented the glass from plopping off onto the floor.

It got even hairier from there. While continually rotating the rod, I had to quickly walk over to a stainless-steel table and in one fell swoop, smack, pull and roll the liquid glass against the table top before it hardened beyond maneuverability. The closest thing I can compare this step to is patting the head while rubbing the tummy. In other words, impossible.

"What we're doing here is pulling enough glass off the end of the rod to create our piece," Patterson said. In this case, the piece-to-be was a small (approximately 3-inch) heart. "Keep it turning, keep it turning, don't stop," Patterson gently rallied. Easier said.